YOUNG KING

The Arab State of Iraq is as juicy with oil as an olive. So far it has hung on the British economic tree, but last week Britain, experienced as it is in handling olive branches, began to be afraid the Iraq olive would fall off.

Thousands of Iraqi crowded Bagdad's dirty streets, weeping and beating their breasts over the sudden death of 27-year-old King Ghazi I. Iraq's council of ministers announced that the next King would be Ghazi's three-year-old baby boy, Feisal II. For 14 years, until Feisal comes of age, Iraq will be ruled by a regent chosen from among royal uncles and cousins, who may easily fall prey to Iraq's Anglophobe troublemakers. How successful the British may be in educating Feisal to love England remains to be seen, but they will certainly try not to make the mistake they made in educating his father.

That mistake was to cater to Ghazi's love of speed. As a child he rode Arab racing stallions. Sent to be educated at England's Harrow, he learned how to dismantle a high-compression engine before he learned to speak good English. Far too young (12) for a British driving license, he got special permission to roar around Brooklands racing track all by himself. Back in Iraq, he bought one flashy car after another--among others a supercharged, 150-horsepower Auburn with three-inch royal crowns on its doors, a Mercedes done in phosphorescent paint. Before long his craving for speed got him into the air, where he loved to stunt. He took delivery last month on a 200-m.p.h. British plane.

Last week speed cost England dearly. Late one night, a few days after his return from Kut, where he had officially dedicated a 1,615-foot dam which will irrigate the now-dreary site of the Garden of Eden, Ghazi set out from the royal palace in Bagdad in an open sports car. He was on his way to Harthiyah Palace, a few miles from town. As he zoomed past a crossing, he lost control of the car, shot off the road smack into an electric light pole. His skull was crushed and he died within an hour. It took only twelve hours for anti-British trouble to break out.

In Mosul, an oil centre and political hotspot 260 miles up the Tigris from Bagdad, natives were told by agitators that the British had done away with their King. At high noon, an angry mob of Iraqi rushed the city's British Consulate, dragged out 52-year-old Consul George E.A.C. Monck-Mason, a trim, clipped civil servant whose 30-year consular career had taken him to most Near East trouble spots. Then they set fire to the building, and killed George Monck-Mason in the slow, brutal way in which Oriental mobs have for centuries disposed of those they hated; they knocked him down, and standing round as he lay writhing in the dust, stoned him until his body was a bloody pulp.

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